Vilnius 2

Vilnius is a city I wandered around more than took photos of. It is eminently suitable for wandering; its Old Town is large, and the street layout is as bewildering as Rīga's is. Here are some of the few photos that I took. This first is, to my mind, the ubiquitous Vilnius shot. Wherever you look, there is always a church tower or steeple peering out over all the other buildings. I like the contrast of colors here, how the setting sun captures different shades of stone.

Vilnius is lucky to have a little river running through town (as well as a big one). This is the river Vilnia, which is really more of a stream. It loops around Old Town, and in one of its loops sits the groovy neighborhood Užupis. You have to cross little bridges to get to Užupis, which adds to its sense of being set apart from the rest of Old Town. Here's one of the bridges with one of the Orthodox churches in the background. You can see that spring is getting seriously started in Lithuania. By the way, an interior design feature that I saw consistently in the Orthodox churches in Vilnius was the use of marquee lights. Seriously. The Greek letters for "Christ" were spelled out in one church over the icon screen in marquee lights, as if Ethel Merman were going to show up to belt out some Russian chant. 

Here's a panorama from the top of tower in the Museum of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which is one of the former palaces. There's a castle on a hill nearby where I'm sure the view is even better, but that would required climbing the hill. Kathy Knapp, my fellow Fulbrighter, has run up there on one of her morning sprints, and we agreed that sitting down and having lunch in an outdoor café was a far better plan. Unfortunately, the photo doesn't do justice to the view. One of the pleasures of the Vilnius skyline is seeing it punctuated in all directions by Catholic, Lutheran, and Orthodox church spires. 

And this is just a typical street scene, here snapped from the portal of St. Anne's Catholic Church, a little gem of a church and dripping in Gothic-style brickwork. This seems to me to be another ubiquitous snapshot of Vilnius -- churches in the foreground, churches in the background, and cobblestones galore. 

Having said all that, it's also worth noting that Vilnius may look like a museum set but it isn't one. There are loads of tourists, yes, but once you get into the regular neighborhoods, like the one where my hotel was located, you can see that this is very much a working town, filled with ordinary people doing their laundry, walking their kids in strollers, going to their yoga classes, and chatting with their friends in outdoor cafés. You can tell that winter is long in the Baltics because once the outdoor cafés open, they are simply flooded with people who have been cooped up too long in overheated apartments. Daugavpils, three hours to the north, has opened up its outdoor cafés with a vengeance. Every restaurant that can have one does have one. Spring has come, the voice of the turtle is in the land, and the beer is flowing. 

Triviana Latviana 4

I have now joined the ranks of the Latvians, having taken flowers to my dean for her name day. (See previous post.) This extremely Latvian behavior involves both the giving of flowers and the recognition of a name day. You just can't get more Latvian than that. In her office, there were already bouquets galore, a nice spread of salmon on bruschetta, Lithuanian cream cake (of course), Latvian sausages, sweet cheese, crab salad, cookies, and coffee. You have to give it to the Baltics: they celebrate at the drop of a hat, and the celebrations involve great food. And lots of it.

Last week there were three holidays in Latvia. 1 May is Workers' Day, May Day elsewhere in the world. I am unsure if this is a legacy of Soviet times -- I do know that in Moscow, this was a day for a big parade that showed off military hardware -- but here it seems that it is theoretically about workers. I didn't see a lot of celebrating for this, but this might be analagous to the United States' Labor Day, which is really an excuse for a three-day weekend. For non-American readers, Labor Day is always the first Monday in September, and it (un)officially marks the end of summer.

The second holiday, 4 May, is Independence Day, though I am not sure that it's called that. I don't exactly know what the official name is, which is mildly confusing because Latvia has two independence days, as near as I can tell. The first one in 18 November, which marks the birth of the Latvian nation in 1918 (100 years next year! Bring on the cake and coffee!). Every city in the country has a 18 Novembra iela (18 November Street), which tells you that this is an important day. The May holiday marks the independence from the Soviet Union, which for Latvians is an equally important day. There was considerable fuss on this day; the Latvian flag was hung everywhere (all buildings have flagpoles attached to them for this purpose), there was singing and dancing in the city square, there were special concerts, there was a craft fair. It's a big deal.

The third, 9 May, celebrates the end of the World War II, and this one is celebrated primarily by Russians in Latvia; at the time, after all, Latvia was still a Soviet republic. It is difficult for an American to fully comprehend the colossal devastation and loss of life that the Soviet Union endured for the five years of war. Estimates are about 27 million deaths, though nobody honestly knows. There were a number of very old men and women with their medals on their jackets. They are perhaps the children of war veterans because the actual veterans would now be in their late 80s and 90s. Everybody else wore ribbons in orange and black, which gave the whole affair a Hallowe'en air, though I am sure that was not the intent. The color of the ribbons must mean something, though I am not sure what. There were enormous numbers of flowers laid at the WWII memorial in the park adjacent to my flat, and there were fireworks that evening. I know this because they started outside my window within thirty seconds of my going to bed. I of course got up and watched them, figuring that I would be a little fuzzy in my 8:00 morning class the next day, and indeed I was.

 One of the pleasures of being in Latvia is drinking the endless beers that are available here. You haven't heard of any of them. My new favorite is a light beer, perfect for summer, brewed in nearby Kraslava ("KRAHSS-lah-vuh") and called, logically enough, Kraslava. There's also a dark beer that I need to try. Valmiermuīža ("VOLL-meer-mwee-zhuh") is another superb beer, recommended by former Fulbrighter Steven Vickers. It is dark and foamy; you sort of eat it rather than drink it. I think I've mentioned Lielvārdes ("LEEL-var-des," just like it's spelled) already as well. Latvia is not a wine-producing country so much, though I am told that the northernmost winery in Europe is actually in Latvia. But you can get great wine here from all over Europe. French and Italian wines would be the obvious choices, but I have discovered table wines from Moldova. Moldova is one of the great wine nations of the world, and you probably didn't know this. Some wine experts say that the best wines in the world come from Moldova, but they are totally unknown because it was another Soviet republic that never exported its goods. Others among you may not even be aware that there is such a country as Moldova, but there is. Consult a European map. That is, consult a recent European map.

Though I have not explored them much, there are lots and lots of vodkas from Russia that you have never heard of if you're American. My take is that if the label is in Cyrillic, then it's a real Russian vodka and maybe not exported at all. The range of vodkas is remarkable, as is the Russian capacity for drinking it. My Russian comrades are more than happy to share their expertise in this burgeoning field.

Spring is slowly springing in Latvia, and one of the manifestations of this is that daylight hours are extremely long. Latvia is pretty far north, as you see if you look at a map of Europe. Maine, by contrast, is at the same latitude as southern France, which usually surprises Mainers because the weather sure isn't comparable. This means that here in Latvia dusk occurs later and later and later. Currently it's at about 10:30 pm, which is very disorienting to me. Darkness at home is a visual signal that it's time to go to bed, but it just doesn't get dark here. And we are still a month away from the summer solstice, which is a huge celebration in Latvia. Daybreak is about 5:00. My biological clock will be permanently altered by the time I go home.

For the record, Latvia, like most of Europe, uses what Americans call military time. 10:30 pm is actually 22:30 -- that is, the twenty-second hour of the day. 3:00 pm is 15:00, 6:15 pm is 18:15, and so on. This takes some getting used to. It took me a month to figure out that all you do is subtract 12 from the number that looks odd, and you get American time. I am a bit slow, but now I manage it fine.

My phone company, LMT, has given all of its customers free internet all week on their smartphones. To what do we owe this corporate benevolence? Why, the world hockey championships, of course. LMT wants to assure all Latvians that they will not miss a minute of the Latvian national team beating all the other European teams -- which so far they have done. I don't know what to make of this corporate policy other than to find it delightful. Today Latvia is playing the United States. I have prudently chosen to not take sides, a fact that bewildered my adult English class. As you can imagine, they have taken sides.

Vilnius

I wasn't in Lithuania long enough to really write very intelligently about it, nor even in the capital Vilnius to really do it justice. I had a three days' holiday there on our spring break, where I met up with Kathy Knapp of the University of Connecticut -- another Fulbrighter who is teaching at Vilnius University this term. We met at the Fulbright orientation meeting last summer in Washington, D.C., and made plans to meet some time. So here we are! That's St. Nicholas Orthodox Church in the background. What this photo does not capture is the hordes of European tourists everywhere. The Baltics are not on most North Americans' itineraries (yet), but Europeans sure have discovered them.

Vilnius is a lovely city built on hills so that there are lots of interesting vistas. Its Old Town is one of the largest in Europe and mostly beautifully restored. In particular, there are Baroque Catholic churches. Lithuania is a very Catholic country compared to Latvia and Estonia, and the churches apparently came into money in the Baroque period with the rise of the Grand Ducky of Lithuania, which ruled over a considerable chunk of central northern Europe. So most of the churches are dripping with statuary and fancy drippings, all designed to send you into celestial orbit. But my favorite was this little gem, St. Anne's, which has some Baroque features but never lost its essential Gothic vibe.

I mostly walked around the city, which is compact, dense, and very walkable. The fact that there is a cafe every ten meters helped, where you could get your morning, afternoon, and/or evening kava. Lithuanian is closely related to Latvian, but they are not mutually intelligible. So just when I felt I was getting the hang on one language, I had to deal with yet another one. Probably more people spoke English in Lithuania, though, which was helpful.

It is a museum city, as is fitting for a capital. It does have some rivalry, though, with Kaunas, about 90 kilometers to the west, which sees itself as the cultural capital and Lithuanian heart of the country. That said, the Lithuanian Picture Gallery is sort of the national gallery, and it seems to be housed in what was a house in the city's core. You feel as if you are wandering around someone's private space, someone with good taste and a lot of blank walls. The Museum of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was kind of a wash, on the other hand. It has lots of good stuff but not much in terms of explaining why the stuff is important. You start in the foundations of what was the castle, and the ruins are marked as, well, ruins. "Here is the rubble from when a wall fell in the fourteenth century." And sure enough, that's rubble in front of you. That sort of thing. Here is a pot. Here are a bunch of bombard balls from the sixteenth century (sort of a precursor to cannon balls). Yeah, yeah, but what's the story behind all this? I was glad that Kathy was with me for this museum. Cracking jokes about all this stuff made it quite fun.

The best part of Vilnius is Užupis, a little neighborhood tucked in the bend of the Vilna River. This is where the hipsters live, so much so that the neighborhood has adopted its own constitution which is posted on one of the street walls in 25 different languages. Among its provisions:

• Everybody has the right to be sad. 
• Everybody has the right to celebrate or not celebrate their birthday. 
• Every dog has the right to be a dog.
• A cat is not obligated to love its owner, but it must help out if help is needed. 

I could live under such a constitution. Here is Užupis's main crossroad, and just up this street is a terrific Italian restaurant where I had a little glass of the house wine and some excellent pasta. This is something that I have missed in Latvia. Though there is pizza galore, there is a dearth of real Italian cooking in Daugavpils. Someone should open a restaurant -- I'm just sayin'.

Cisneros in Latvia

Each year, the U.S.A. Information Center in Daugavpils (an outreach branch of the U.S. Embassy in Latvia) hosts a literary event in one of the area high schools, this year at the Russian Lyceum. The event consists of a group of educators choosing a book that speaks to the American experience. High schoolers and high school teachers from all over the city read it and then meet to discuss it. It's like a book club, though on a rather grander scale.

This year the committee that organizes this event chose the book that I suggested: Sandra Cisneros's coming-of-age novel The House on Mango Street. I suggested it for a number of reasons: 1) it's short, which is no small consideration with readers for whom English is not their first language; 2) it's also very poetic, so it would present some challenge to these very skilled English readers; 3) it's taught everywhere from elementary schools to graduate schools in different contexts, so it's an easy teach; and 4) it offers a Latino prism on American culture that would likely be unfamiliar to Latvians. If you haven't read it, go do so, and you may thank me later for the recommendation.

Here are some photos of the day, which took place on April 18. First, me and the teachers, followed by one of the lead organizers Irīna Bučinska. Then there's the auditorium at the Russian lyceum itself, which I sort of dig with its Balt Deco styling.

The most important participants of the day, however, were the diligent students, who gathered, discussed, and presented on Cisneros's prose-poetry novel. To my knowledge, this is the first time that Cisneros has been taught in Latvia. I hope it won't be the last.

There are more photos on the Info Center's Facebook page, and lots more information about its many programs. As always, thanks to coordinator extraordinaire Natalija Oševerova for making all of this happen. The event concluded with more free books for these readers from the Embassy and, of course, chocolate for everybody.

Soviet 2

A few weeks ago, I spent a rainy day at the Latvian National Museum of Art. It's a wonderful museum in a Beaux Arts building, and I mean no disrespect to Latvia when I say it's not very big. There's plenty of Latvian art, but you don't feel overwhelmed by it the way the V&A in London or the Metropolitan Museum of Art In New York just give you too much art. You can manage Latvia's national art museum, thank you very much.

When in the museum, you realize that Latvia has always been in touch with the rest of Europe in terms of art. (It's located there, after all, so this can't come as a total surprise.) Latvian Impressionism was closely in touch with Russian Impressionism, for example, and if you didn't know that there was a school of Russian Impressionism, you have some research to do. But though I feel that I'm not supposed to say this, honestly, my favorite gallery was the one that contained all the Soviet art.

Not that it was all great art, but that a gallery full of it existed at all. Soviet art was of course meant to be ideological: "national in form, socialist in content" is the key phrase. It meant that artists (not just visual artists, but writers, composers, sculptors, you name it) had severe constraints placed on them to express the glories of the socialist paradise being built right now before all of humankind! (Never mind those gulags and death camps and dissidents being tortured in psychiatric wards.) As you might imagine, at it worst this produced clunky, ideological schlock. At its best, though, it could produce art that really did inspire people.

That's the statement that I feel I am not supposed to make because, well, you know -- it's the Soviet Union again. And one painting in particular, with the clunky title "Masters of the Land," is a sort of cubist rendering of sturdy harvesters on a collective farm, taming the vast fields to bring humankind all the closer to a socialist Mecca. It's sort of dopey, frankly. But another painting of Latvian fishermen -- I forget the title -- is great. It's realistic, which socialist realism tended to be, which is one strike against it. We all know that great twentieth-century art is supposed to be inaccessible and abstract. This is just a great painting of a fishing competition that captures a moment like a snapshot would. I know that theoretically I'm not supposed to like it, but I do.

In its discussion of the entire gallery, the museum's appraisal of this hard-to-talk-about school, if we can even call it that, is unusually intelligent. While acknowledging that this era of art is highly problematic for all sorts of ideological reasons, it also assesses how artists worked, or didn't, within the highly politicized structure that they were forced to, how that created art, and what kind it created. I didn't like everything I saw, but I did like some of it, and I'm still sorting out how I feel about that. I think that a good test might be to take a work from this gallery and hang it somewhere else -- maybe in a show of early twentieth-century neo-realism like the work of, say, Thomas Hart Benton, and into which some of this Soviet art would fit nicely.. In a different context, devoid of its ideological underpinnings, would we appreciate it differently? I bet that we would. I very much appreciate the Latvian National Museum of Art's decision to collect this art and engage its visitors with it.

That said, there are two more works of Soviet art in Rīga worth mentioning. One is the truly clunky Academy of Sciences building, a Stalinist "wedding cake" of the type that Stalin was so fond of bestowing on cities in the Eastern bloc, whether they wanted them or not. (I would guess that they generally didn't, but when a dictator presents you with a building, it's in your best interest to accept it graciously.) It's a building that looks like, well, a wedding cake, with "layers" of stories that get increasingly smaller the higher it goes. But it doesn't go high enough; that is, it's so short and squat that it has no vertical thrust the way the Empire State Building does, so it looks as if someone took what was supposed to be a skyscraper and sat on it. The neo-Gothic decoration does not help matters any, either. If you think it's bad, try an even bigger and worse version of the "wedding cake" building, the Palace of Culture in Warsaw. Varsovians are fond of saying that the best view of Warsaw is from the top of the Palace of Culture because it's the one place in Warsaw where you don't have to look at the Palace of Culture.

The other is the World War II monument in a park on the west side of the Daugava River. I know that this huge set of statues is supposed to engage one with the immense sacrifice the Soviet Union made in WWII. And it was colossal -- an estimated 27 million dead, though nobody has an exact figure. So is the monument colossal. It is so colossal, in fact, that it crosses the line into kitsch, as far as I'm concerned. The statue of the Mother, I am guessing (as in Motherland, Rodina in Russian) reaches 150 feet into the sky, straining to grasp something. It is not clear why. When I first saw her, I thought she was trying to get something from the top shelf. Her cape (cape?) billowing out behind her. But because it's in bronze, it too heavy to have any energy. It just looks heavy and rather silly. On the other side of the monument, there are a group of soldiers who stylistically seem unrelated to Mother, as if they wandered in from another monument. They are engaged in what looks like a rugby scrum. In the middle of the monument is a narrow, vertical plinth of five very tall columns, each with a star at the top for the five years of the war. In short, the whole thing is a very large muddle, a memorial as executed by committee.

I know that this monument in all its glorious colossal-ness is meant to inspire awe. But it's so over the top that it just doesn't, can't work for me. Art shouldn't have to pummel you over the head to be inspiring. This is why Maya Lin's Vietnam Veteran's Memorial in Washington, D.C. is everything a war memorial should be, and Rīga's is everything it shouldn't. Her simple gash in the ground inscribed with the names of all those who died in that war allows the participant to engage with the memorial in any way she or he sees fit. The Soviet monument sees fit to interpret the war for you; it's as if it refuses to trust your feelings about the Great Patriotic War and insists on imposing on you the feelings that it thinks you're supposed to have. That said, it is worth seeing, as art is, good or bad. It's only in evaluating a wide range that we can see how it all fits together, and even bad art has a place in helping us define what possibilities there are for good art.

Soviet

I spent Friday night at the American Center of the Latvian National Library running a book discussion group. This event is part of monthly book group called "Books are Still Cool," which they are, of course, and is sponsored by the U.S. Embassy in Riga. The events are spearheaded by Nils Students, an American-born Latvian citizen who has lived here since the '90s and who works for the U.S. Embassy.

I suggested Anya von Bremzen's Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing, which I had read when my local library, the Lithgow Library in Augusta, Maine, acquired it. I loved it. A survey of the history of the Soviet Union through the prism of food, the book is both a macro- and micro-history. First, it surveys the Soviet Union and its Communist Party's complicated food policy, exploring how it tried to engineer a new, more highly evolved human in its purported "socialist paradise" by every means possible, including food production, delivery, and consumption. It's also a multi-generational history of Bremzen's Russian family, from her grandparents at the turn of the Russian Revolution to her dissident mother, her emigration to the United States with her mother, and their return to Russia before and after the fall of communism. Bremzen herself is a highly honored food writer with three James Beard awards to her credit. The book is fascinating. It is sometimes surprisingly funny. It is sometimes horrific; the story of the Leningrad blockade in which the Nazis essentially starved that Russian city to death will appall you. And it is always wistful for Russian and, yes, Soviet food. Plus there are Russian recipes. (Bremzen's first cookbook, Please to the Table, explores Russian cuisine from every part of that great country, and it won her her first Beard award.)

Bremzen's great virtue as a chronicler of her family's history is that she doesn't settle for easy, pat, black and white responses to the Soviet insistence on intruding on virtually every aspect of a citizen's life. Her mother despised the Soviet system, finally leaving it once and for all -- and at the time, with no right of return, ever. But her military grandfather benefited highly from the system, and as a child, Bremzen accommodated it in all sorts of ways. And that's really what her family story is about: how people accommodated a system that did its darnedest to control virtually every aspect of private life in order to create greater-good-for-all-comrades Communists.

I thought that this book would sell well in Latvia, given its own Soviet history. Readers would have the opportunity to talk about how their own families dealt with Soviet history and, not coincidentally, food. And that in fact is what happened, which pleased me greatly. Some readers noted that the assumption among Latvians was that Moscovites had it better than anybody, and they were pleased to discover that in Bremzen's Moscow family, this was not the case. (As a matter of fact, the best of the Baltics was sent to Russia and especially Moscow, most likely to be consumed the Communist Party bigwigs who got the best of everything.) Others spoke of the endless shortages of literally everything and living on a food budget of one ruble a day. None of them were pleased about this hardship, but significantly nobody gave me the impression that it was impossible to manage under this cock-eyed food system, either. And we talked about favorite foods, from childhood, from Soviet times, from Latvian cuisine, from Russian cuisine. 

I did find out, though, that according to Nils at least one international Latvian-born reader chimed in on social media when the book was announced about how inappropriate this was, for a couple of reasons: 1) there is no such thing as Soviet cooking and 2) how dare some uppity American suggest that Latvians read something with "Soviet" in the title. He did not come to the group, as he lives overseas -- in Australia, I think. But he was highly offended by my book choice.

Obviously, this man did not read the description of the book carefully, thinking it was a cookbook rather than a memoir. His second point really struck me, though. I have always been of the mind that no idea is so scary or dangerous that we can't talk about it, but obviously the word "Soviet" struck a raw nerve. In suggesting this book, I didn't mean to say that Latvians should want to relive or glorify the Soviet period. And in fact, the book does no such thing; it is highly critical of the Soviet Union, and rightfully so. As I have said elsewhere in this blog, the Soviet Union did the Baltics no favors. Environmentally, the Soviet Union was one long, unmitigated disaster, the legacy of which we are still living with. (This was a country that made an entire sea disappear.) Politically, it was a brutal, cynical nightmare. One of the most beautiful Art Nouveau buildings in Rīga is the museum of the Soviet occupation, the place where the KGB (Soviet secret police) tortured, killed, and "morally humiliated" dissidents, as its sign says. On a lesser note, everybody knew that there were two systems in operation: one for the hacks who cooperated with the Communist Party and who got the best of everything, and one for everybody else who got the crumbs on the table. When there were crumbs. So much for equality, comrade.

I do mean to say, though, that here many citizens' relationship to the Soviet period is extremely complicated. As Bremzen's book makes very clear, she is very nostalgic for her Soviet childhood because she figured out ways to make the system work for her, as many people did. Her mother's endless pushing against the system meant that she and mother focused on each other, and their private bond, where the State could not intrude, drives much of the narrative. She is cynical about the worn Soviet platitude, "Thank you, Dedushka [Grandfather] Lenin, for our happy socialist childhood," while acknowledging that her childhood in fact was happy. She is nostalgic for the very proletarian kotleti, or meat patties, that were the staple of every Soviet household -- and mind you, this is a food writer who eats in the best restaurants on the planet. I have a feeling that most people just got on with their lives, the same ways my parents did growing up in the Depression. When everybody's poor, who notices that everybody's poor? I don't want to say more about the book than this in order to encourage you to read it yourself. But I do think that the idea that Soviet times were unspeakably grim isn't the whole story. It's worth noting that in Latvia, pushing against the Soviet Union was in part pushing for Latvia, or at least the idea of Latvia, so there may be real differences that play out here. But Bremzen's book is an excellent reminder that one can have complex, love-hate relationships with things that one is supposed to love. Or hate. 

Russian Gymnasium

On 31 March, I went with Natalija Oševerova of the USA Information Center in Daugavpils to talk to students at the Russian gymnasium in town about study opportunities for students in the United States. There are a few exchange programs that are worth knowing about, one run by the U.S. State Department, another by an organization called the Baltic-American Freedom Foundation, and a couple of others. But those first two are the big ones.

A gymnasium (ģimnāzija in Latvian) in this context is not a large room in which to play basketball but a school. It looks to be a cross between an elementary school, middle school, and junior high school, to put it into American terms. After the gymnasium, students will go to the Russian lyceum (licejs), or high school equivalent.

These are smart students who are very curious about the U.S., so I would love to see some of them apply for these scholarships. After the information part was over, we just had an informal question and answer period about what American high schools are like. Obviously, one difference is that a teacher might sit on the desk.

In general, I would say that American schools emphasize breadth over depth: one takes a wider range of courses in an American high school (some of which, shock of shocks, you actually get to choose yourself), but they might be more cursory than the kind of in-depth work that Latvian students do. So they were likely to be advanced in their studies if they attended a year of high school in the States. This is especially true in terms of foreign languages. Bear in mind that all of these students are pretty much trilingual already -- already fluent in Russian and Latvian, their English was little short of superb -- and they would be the envy of their linguistically challenged American colleagues.

I also said that American high schools dominate social life in a way that they don't in Europe. It is curious that Americans expect their high schools to do much of the socialization work that might properly be left to the family, the church, outside clubs, and other institutions that do that sort of work. Schools are where you're expected to make your best friends, learn to become a good citizen, be involved . . . and I won't even go into how sports dominate the social life of high schools. As you might expect, a book-loving nerd like me was not popular in my high school, which honored prowess at football more than anything. I wish we had talked about pep rallies, an truly alien concept if there ever was one. I am guessing that the old American adage "High school is the happiest time of your life" and that you are supposed to pine wistfully about your high school experience for the rest of your life would simply not ring true here. Here high school (secondary school) is where you get an education. Happiness isn't the point. Why in the world would it be?

 

Chatting with the students informally was a ball. They were curious about American football, that game that is the love child of rugby and D-Day. They were pleased that real football (that is, soccer) was gaining in popularity in the States. (For my American readers, you may not be aware that in the rest of the world, football means soccer. Most American sports are not truly world sports at all. It is amusing to think that the annual champion pro baseball team in the U.S. claims to have won the World Series, when in fact it has done no such thing at all.)

One student was fascinated by the idea of a host family. "Why would they want to have us for a year?" she asked incredulously. I explained that cultural exchange is a two-way street: a host family will learn as much from you as you will learn from it. You want to see the world, and they want you to see it because they understand why living in a different culture is important. If they can't go live somewhere else, they can at least host you and introduce you to Froot Loops and Thanksgiving Day celebrations. For the record, they loved the idea of Thanksgiving, as everybody should.

Finally, one student was a gifted amateur magician, and his card tricks were really impressive. I was impressed also at how much these students had bonded with each other. The other students were as pleased by the magician's sleight of hand as he was. I think that they have been in classes together for most of their lives, and there is something to be said for that model that Americans adopt only until about the sixth or seventh grade and then drop in favor of "floating" schedules.

Visiting schools in the area is seriously fun. It's odd to be exotic as a native English speaker, and it's good to meet people where they are and find out what their own interests. As expected, the session ended with prolonged applause, which always embarrasses me, and a gift of Laima chocolates, which never does.